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Talking Holistic Law with Stu Webb

Submitted by Guest on September 7, 2010 - 10:14pm

Register for Friday's free teleseminar with Stu Webb at http://www.iahl.org/events

As a long-time advocate of the need to find ways to improve our legal system, I quickly responded to the New York Times article about Bill Van Zyverden’s creation of IAHL and joined the organization. This resulted in some wonderful Annual Meetings: Washington DC and admission to the Supreme Court; Florida Keys; several New England settings, Lake Tahoe, among others. Thank you, Bill.

One of Bill’s ingenious decisions was not to attempt to define “holistic law”, but to leave it to the members and their advocacy to give it meaning in their day-to-day practice. We have sought to do this in our workshops and our lives.

Our up-coming telephone conference will be another opportunity to engage in this exercise and share in aspects of holistic law that are working for us.

Without making Collaborative Law the subject of our conversation, at some point, as Founder of this concept, I may share my experience of Collaborative Law as a subset example of one way of practicing law in a holistic manner.

For those of you not familiar with Collaborative Law, it’s basic premise—and one holistically centered--is that each of the parties’ collaborative lawyers work for settlement only and do not go to court. The lawyers withdraw from representation if the case does not settle.

This makes a dramatic—and holistic—shift in the way the attorneys work with their clients---and each other.

The parties have the option to utilize trained neutral interdisciplinary experts to assist in the settlement, e.g. neutral financial experts, mental health professions and child specialists.

Other resulting holistic impacts:

*The process encourages coming from an implicit spiritual base, encouraging integrity, honesty, fairness, cooperation, intuition, trustworthiness, respect, etc.
*The attorneys come from centered places in support of their clients and the settlement space.
*The relationship between the lawyers shifts from an adversary to a facilitative mode.
*Four-way problem-solving meetings set a positive setting for communication and resolution.
*Full disclosure in the norm so all working on the same page.

Join us on Friday to discuss this important topic and any other issues you want to raise.